In Memoriam -Matthew Shepard

Today, in 1998, Matthew Shepard was beaten and left tied to a fence. Five days later, he died. Because he was gay. Matthew died brutally, cruelly, and completely unnecessarily. The only way I can think of to subvert a tiny bit of the evil that resulted in his death is to learn something from it.

For some people (that I live with), his death challenged their belief that the death penalty is wrong. That's not hard to understand. For them, Matthew's father's comments to the court were helpful. There's a lot of anger and a need to see the perpetrators punished in his statement. That's not hard to understand, either. But the Shepard family concluded, apparently, that healing could begin best if they didn't extract all the revenge to which they were legally entitled. And if they, surely beside themselves with grief, could do it, well then, we can give it a shot. Read his statement, here: Dennis Shepard's statement to the court.

For me, the issue was different. I could never quite wrap my brain around how I felt about hate crime legislation. On the one hand, I think it's wildly dangerous to punish people for what they're thinking. On the other hand, I endorse the feminist claim that words are powerful -and it seemed perfectly obvious (to me, at that time)that, if there was ever a justification for penalty enhancements because of hatred, this was the case.

So, now was the time to make some sense out of my scattered thoughts. The best I could do is this. Hate crime legislation is justifiable because it doesn't legislate against hate -exactly. You can hate the people you hate. I can think you're making a mistake and wish you'd shut the hell up. But to protect my right to think what I want to think and say what I want to say, I have to defend your right to do the same thing. What hate crime legislation does do is to legally state our consensus that there are some social hierarcies that are illegitimate. When an action tries to enforce these illegitimate hierarchies against our collective will, that's a hate crime.

For example, we've come slowly and incompletely to the agreement that it's wrong to discriminate against people because of their skin color. You can still be a bigot; that's not a hate crime, even though you are, in fact, hating someone. But the minute you use your bigotry in an act of violence or subordination of someone else, that is a hate crime. So, it's actions rather than thoughts that we're punishing with hate crime legislation.

I'm not entirely sure that this argument hangs together, and I'm open to conversation about it. However, my actual point today is that Matthew Shepard lived well, died too young and too cruelly -but he didn't live or die in vain if we can keep the questions he raised for us front and center.

Rest in peace, Matthew.